He Lives Again

Let me say, now briefly, but very sincerely that it is a great privilege to share once again in the life of this church, which bears witness to the gospel of God, adjacent to a university campus and a theological seminary and across the street from entrepreneurs. And it's a great privilege to be here for Wallace Alston and Alice Alston have been my friends for more than 40 years. Let us hear the Word of God from Job the 14th chapter. A man that is born of a woman is a few days and full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower and withers. He flees like a shadow and continues not. There is hope for a tree. If it be cut down, it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease, though its roots grow old in the earth and its stump dies in the ground.

Yet at the center of water, it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. When man dies and is laid low, man breathes his last, and where is he? If a man die, shall he live again? May God bless to us this reading and hearing of his holy word. Amen. Let us hear the word of God from the New Testament. John the 14th chapter. Let not your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you that I go to prepare a place for you. And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself where I am, you may be also. May God bless this reading and hearing of His Word. Let us pray. Gracious God, follow the preaching of Thy Word with the blessing of Thy Spirit.

If A Man Die

And insofar as it is true, it shall be undergirded by Thy power. And so far as it is false, it shall be quickly forgotten and do no harm in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Job's very personal question, if a man die shall he live again, is the human question, the question of every human being. Job knew that life is short, that our days are numbered, that we cannot add to them. And sooner or later, each of us knows this too, even in an affluent, scientific, technologically advanced society. We ought not to underestimate the vicissitudes of life. Life is an uphill battle, and in In spite of illusions along the way, we all in the end lose. We all die. Job's question is no longer asked so frequently in our society, in part because of the illusion that we can somehow avoid it, and in part because of the idea or notion that death is simply a biological fact that is not too serious.

A secular society cannot take death seriously. We debate endlessly in our schools about the origin of the world. And we can carry on this debate without existential trauma, at least as long as it is put in terms of the creationists versus the evolutionists. But if it is put in a more profound way, Is human life the expression of the purpose of God, or as we in the Christian church would say, of God's grace? Or is it the product of forces with no provision of therein? Then the question of origin becomes very personal and very distressing. But we say little or nothing in our society about the end of the world, or even about death itself, which should be the more pressing question than the origin of the world. The simple fact is that a secular society cannot take death seriously, or the end of the world seriously, because it has no plausible answer to the questions which they raise.

Job's question is no longer asked in the New Testament, but for a very different reason. Here, everything is seen in the light of the greatest event in the history of the human race. God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, changing as Clement of Alexandria, The great theologian of the turn of the third century like to say, changing all of our sunsets into sunrises. And thus, in the New Testament and the fourth gospel, we read, let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me and my father's house or many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself that where I am, you may be also. And Paul, on the basis of God's raising Jesus Christ, the dead could say to the Thessalonians, we sour not as those who have no hope.

The Fact Of Death

In the light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we shall reflect this morning on Job's question. Let us begin with the fact of death. As sooner or later, every culture, every society, every human being must. Ambassador George Kennan, whom some of you know, once declared on the basis of his experience in Moscow that nothing in all the world is so dreary as a communist funeral in which the meaninglessness of life is expounded by the meaninglessness of death. Ambassador Kennan goes on to report that Ambassador Bullitt, who preceded him, had believed that communism was doomed because it had no answer for the basic problem of death. And it may well be, as Peter Berger and Irving Kristol and others are beginning to suggest, the secular culture and reign so supremely in modern universities and in the secular media may also collapse because it too has no answer, no plausible answer to the fundamental questions that human beings raise.

There There was a certain sadness but a certain hope in the picture of Yeltsin standing at his mother's grave with his head bowed and his eyes closed beside a tombstone in the shape of a cross after decades of the endeavor to eliminate religion or the Christian religion from the life of the Russian people. Death may be a simply a natural fact for animals but for human beings death is never simply a natural biological fact. Death is always complicated by the power of the human spirit, to transform life, to imagine something beyond our present life, to contemplate a life not enclosed by death, and above all grasp something of the meaning and the significance of what it is to be alive as a human being in God's world. Augustine, the great North African theologian, spoke of the basic difference between dying and having to die.

Animals simply die, but human beings have to die. They know that death is unavoidable, yet they can imagine something greater than death. New Testament declares that death is the last enemy to be destroyed. The writers of the New Testament knew full well that death belongs to the created order and, as such, belongs to the goodness of God's world, but they also knew that sin always complicates the fact of death and makes death the occasion of great sin, and they knew that apart from their faith that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Death calls in question all the meaning and significance of human life and of human history. Death is not simply a natural fact for human beings. Yet neither should Christians conceive it as a faith, as a power that overwhelms us.

Death As A Social Problem

Karl Rahner, the most influential Roman Catholic theologian of this century, insists that death should be understood as an event in which the dying person consciously participates. Death should be the event in which we, with our certain poise and dignity and serenity that come from faith in the living God, bring to an end this particular episode about human existence. Indeed, Rahner goes on to conclude in a very remarkable way that death is the occasion of the greatest human freedom, the greatest human freedom when we make the final commitment of our life and of our life work. Death is not simply a personal and individual problem. It is also a social and public and community problem. Individuals die, but so do institutions, cultures, societies, great nations.

As a young man, Augustine exalted in the glory and the wonder of Rome, a Rome that was now officially Christian, the whole world, he sang, has become a choir praising our Christ. But in the end, he knew that all political institutions infallible. Eternal Rome is eternal nonsense. In recent years, many people, some of whom have given up on God, find the meaning of life in the identity with causes and social agendas with which they are identified. Yet the fact is, as H. Richard Niebuhr like to insist, The fact is, our causes all die. Hence, death is the pivotal question, not simply for individuals, but also for public social existence. Reinhold Niebuhr's great work, The Nature and Destiny of Man, in which he tried to analyze the limits and the possibilities of history, concludes with a chapter on the resurrection of the body the Last Judgment, and the Second Coming of Christ, because he knew that you cannot really make sense out of history apart from the truth embodied in those Christian doctrines.

Hope And Human Experience

Over against death, you and I this morning hope, this hope arises out of human experience. The hope of individual existence beyond death is one of the very few almost universal ideas in the history of the human race. In every human society going back to Neanderthal man or people, the idea has been affirmed in the care of the dead, in burial rites, and in literature. Human beings in every time and in every place have known the reality of meaning and love and significance. And on the basis of this de-human knowledge, they have challenged the sovereignty of death. As Tennyson put it, thou madeest man he knows not why. He thinks he was not made to die. Thou hast made him thou art just. Our awareness that human life ought not to end may be more apparent in the lives of others than in our understanding of our own lives.

It may be more apparent in the life of a friend who has blessed us along the way, in persons who embody in remarkable ways intelligence and judgment and courage and generosity. And we know that such a life should not come to an end. A world that does not care for the wonder and dignity and glory and generosity of human lives is unjust and irrational. And this injustice of life needs to be noted because often in the modern world, The expectancy of life beyond death has been declared a cause for injustice. Feuerbach insisted that immortality and God alike were projections of human desires. Eternal life may be a desire for ourselves here and now. and Karl Marx and Freud and Feuerbach's train. And it must be admitted that there is some truth in the conclusion that heaven may be only the projection of our human desires, yet even if it is, the fact that we wish for heaven does not invalidate the idea.

However much it may corrupt it, it may be that in some societies the hope for heaven has been an opiate of the people. That people have been persuaded to put up with injustice for the sake of glory later. But certainly this is not true of the secular society in which you and I live. Our society may be uncertain about whether or not there is a heaven beyond death. But there is no uncertainty by many groups in our society concerning their intention to establish through their own efforts a heaven here on earth, and therefore our society needs to learn what Bunyan so clearly put in Pilgrim's Progress. The one and only true heaven is not vanity fire, is not the secular city. And moreover, when God is forgotten, when the building of heaven becomes a human effort, it leads to fanaticism and to self-righteousness and bringing in on earth a heaven that exists by our own efforts.

At its best, a belief in God's heaven has given human beings a certain equanimity, a certain dignity, a certain poise in presence of the frustrations of Earth because they know that our final security is not in our human achievements, but in God's grace. And yet it is worth noting that the hope of heaven does have a relevance to the cause of justice in our society. When I was a minister in Alabama, Dr. Carl Menninger spoke on the campus of a neighboring school. And after his speech, a young college student asked Dr. Menninger to tell the people who had gathered there how the promise of heaven had undercut social justice, that people had been persuaded to put up with injustices and promises of glory, by and by, high in the sky, by and by. And Dr. Menninger replied that as a Christian, an elder, He hoped for eternal life, but then he wanted to make one comment, and that was this.

If there is no pie in the sky by and by, a vast number of people will never get any pie. Furthermore, an afternoon of eternal life has added a certain dignity to human existence. It declares in the clearest way possible that just as God's grace is the origin of every human life, so God is the end of every human life. The meaning of human existence cannot be written on earth between birth and death. It has its origin in God's grace and its fulfillment in God's heaven. But our real hope for eternal life is not based upon human experience and not based upon the need for justice. Our hope for eternal life is the outgrowth of our belief in God. When we say I believe in God the Father Almighty, we declare that the world and human life are not the product of impersonal forces, but are the expression of purpose and intentionality.

The Resurrection Of Christ

When we affirm that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the creator, we declare that the world and every human life is not simply the expression of purpose but of grace and of love. The foundation of our Christian hope rests finally not upon human experience and certainly not upon a general belief in God but upon From the New Testament witness that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and as God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, so we believe He shall raise us. As Paul declared, if God did not raise Jesus Christ from the dead, we are of all people the most miserable. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the great, unique event in human history, and on it everything else depends. Now let us come a step further and ask what is this personal identity or destiny for which we hope the traditional language of theology and of the church in the New Testament has spoken of the resurrection of the body by which the church has never met the resuscitation of a dead corpse, or the reconstruction of the biochemical elements of the human body, but rather that life lived in history, expressed through the body is fulfilled by God's grace and power beyond history.

The resurrection of the body means that a person's life in history, work done in history, human relations that grew in this history, the character shaped by this history, are brought to their completion, to their fulfillment, and to their judgment in the consummation of all things. Human destiny beyond death does not enough, but fulfills life in history. The soul in common language and discourse is possibly most closely identified with the self. The soul is the person, the deciding, acting, loving, speaking, living, I. The relationship of the soul to the body is very complex. A secular society has a strong bias to affirm that the self is simply a function of the brain. The New Testament always assumes that the self is more than simply a bodily function, though it expresses itself through the body.

This conviction of the New Testament is intimated in our own personal knowledge of the self. We know in the depths of our human experience that the eye is more than the body. Wilder Penfield of McGill University, a distinguished leader in medical education and a Presbyterian elder, made an interesting observation and an autobiographical summary of his work as a neurosurgeon. He said he began his work with the conviction that the mind, or as I would say, the self of the soul is simply the function of the body. But after a life of work on the human brain, he came to the opposite conclusion. He declared that by the manipulation of the brain he had compelled people to do many things, to make bodily movements, to utter words, to recall memories that they had forgotten and more vividly than they had ever known them.

Yet in all of his experience, he said he had never been able to cause, by the manipulation of the brain, a person to act personally. They always said, you did this to me. Penfield concluded it would be impossible simply by manipulating the brain to lead a person to a personal act, an act of the self. John Eccles, a Nobel Prize winner in neurology, likewise was so impressed with the human self that he entertained the possibility of the medieval doctrine of creationism. That at a particular time in the life of the fetus, God creates the human person. He also concluded that the human self was possibly a higher form of energy than the brain. And he concluded, as Penfield did, that the self uses the brain as a computer and as a source of power. Our security, though, is a conviction that God creates the self, the person, the soul, and the destiny is secure in God's grace.

Judgment And The Last Day

The New Testament speaks of going to be in the presence of God. Paul tells the Philippians he did not know whether it was better for him to stay among them or to go into the presence of Christ. But later in the Philippian letter, he speaks of the consummation of all things. When every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus is God. impossible to bring into harmony all the affirmations of the New Testament about what happens when a person dies and its relation to what happens in the consummation of all things. These are statements that go beyond our experience, and when we are talking about them, we have to be very modest. Yet the New Testament speaks with great finality about a final judgment and the resurrection at the last day.

The simple fact is there can be no final judgment on anything until the end of all things. We do not know the significance of historical persons of a George Washington or more recently a Vietnam War. We do not know until long after these events have passed. significance in our events in our lives and the significance of a human life can only be understood in terms of the judgment of the whole. The last judgment means that there is no individual destiny apart from the destiny of the human race. We are not simply individuals, we are community and the significance of human life must be seen in both dimensions. The New Testament also speaks of individual destiny in terms of heaven and of hell, and so as Christian literature, Christian piety in all the centuries since.

No one can be glad that there is a hell, and no one ought to foreclose on what God's grace can do. And in particular, no one should desire hell for the sake of revenge or simply punishment. Nicholas Berdyaev, a great Russian philosopher and theologian who died a few decades ago, once said that the only legitimate argument for hell is that if people want to go to hell, there ought to be a hell for them to go to. Hell can be best understood, I think, as God's final ratification of the decisions human beings in their freedom have persistently and tenaciously made over a long period of time concerning their own lives. The best indication we have of the nature of heaven are not to come from the kind of awards we expect in human life like when the lottery ticket or a weekend at the beach.

The best indications we have of heaven come from our life with God. The best indication comes from a life of trust, gratitude, humility, and openness to the neighbor, generosity of spirit, a life in Christ here and now. John Baillie, a very remarkable book written in 1934, quotes a novelist as saying that the banality of human Amusements is the most cogent argument against the immortality of soul, the banality of human amusement, most cogent argument against the immortality of the soul. This statement written before 1934 is even more true today. Who would care? Or what kind of person would it be who would care for eternity, listening to soap operas, or do much of the music on radio and television, or even watching sporting events? Heaven is life with Christ in the presence of God.

The Joys Of Heaven

And the joys of heaven are the joys of a life of grace. Our life has a depth and a breadth that goes beyond anything we know in human experience. But those moments in human experience, when we know the depth and the breadth and the wonder of human existence, those moments when we know what is to be mature as persons made in the image of God and in the community of Christ. These are our best indications of what heaven is like. The ancient question of Job is a truly human question and it confronts us with the ultimate option of faith. On one hand, there is a radical pessimism that finds life without ground, without meaning, and without purpose. And on the other hand, there is the hope of everlasting life with God. The Christian gospel, the glorious good news, is that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and death is not the last word concerning our human lives.

This is the gospel to which the church witnesses in a secular society. There is an old story of a medieval monk who was asked to tell a little child that he was going to die, and he puzzled how he could tell a child he was going to die. And finally he came to the child and said, God made you, God knows you by name and loves you, God came into the world to redeem you, and now God is going to take you to be with himself. And the little boy replied, will you thank him for me?